Time Experience and Transference

Abstract

This paper has examined the historical developments in the understanding of the experience of time in normal and pathological development, with an emphasis on the differences between "objective" time, "subjective" time, the "timelessness" of the system Ucs., and "intrapsychic" time. Using a variety of perspectives--psychobiology, cognitive development, psychosexual development, separation-individuation, and object-relations theory--time experience has been seen to unfold as a result of the constant interrelation of physiological maturation and psychosexual development, with early object relations playing a supraordinate role in organizing the experience of time from its roots in identification with the preoedipal mother (Mother Time), where time is felt as intensity, to the relatively autonomous ego-superego function of time experience in the adult with adequate separation-individuation and capacity for object constancy, where time is felt as duration and continuity. Left unanswered are (1) philosophical questions about the phenomenological observation that all time is experienced in the present in the ego, (2) what the mechanisms for intrasystemic differentiation of past, present, and future are, and (3) metapsychological questions about the locus and mechanism for monitoring the passage of experienced time. The clinical application of concepts of time experience was demonstrated through presentation of aspects of the treatment of a patient for whom time and its experience was the organizing schema for her life, character pathology, and transference neurosis. The fantasy of the omnipotent control of time dominated the analysis and served as a major resistance, yet her manipulation of time served to stabilize the treatment relationship so that analysis became possible.

Hearing the Faith in Time: Countertransference and Religious Metaphor in an Oncology Patient’s Psychotherapy

“…Regardless of the properties of her physical breast, all things being equal, the increasingly symbolized sense of the timelessness of the unconscious and the containing function of the breast allowed her to resume the internalization of the timely breast, and to draw faith from this. 15 15 For further discussion of the development of the sense of temporality and the containing breast, see Colarusso (1979), Green (2002, p. 149), Morris (1983), and Hartocollis (1983). Time and breast were already linked in B's first dream, and possibly in her hourglass symbolism as well.…”

‘When I Can Come on Time I'll be Ready to Finish’: Meanings of Lateness in Psychoanalytic Psychotherapy

“…Mrs R's lateness to sessions was not, at least in this early phase, most usefully taken up in terms of her week‐by‐week relationship with me or with the therapy, but in overall relation to herself and her sense of competence and her fear of what I/others might otherwise expect of her. We may surmise that for this patient: ‘To be defective and dependent was to ensure mother's concern, while to function autonomously threatened the loss of maternal support and love’ (Morris, , p. 668). Being late was a generalized protest and an expression of grievance against those who expected her to become adult with her own responsibilities, of whom I was only one.…”

“…Furthermore, and more relevant to the subject of this paper, there has been an emphasis on our relationship with time as an ongoing element of our grasp of reality and a means of articulating our object relationships (e.g. Morris, ).…”

“…His refusal to take account of the realities of city life was intimately bound up with his pervasive omnipotent defences against a deep terror of vulnerability and contingency. Morris () describes something similar when he writes of a woman patient that: ‘Realistic time experience and behaviour would pose the threat of her awareness of her separateness, loss and rage, affect states she was terrified she could not control’ (p. 669).…”

“…However, despite the richness of the literature on how our experience and relationship with time can be understood psychoanalytically, and of course the innumerable articles that mention lateness in specific instances during a therapy, there is relatively little in the literature that focuses on chronic and extreme lateness. Notable exceptions are Morris (1983), Meissner (2006) and Piovano (2008). TIME AND REALITY Freud pointed out that: 'There is nothing in the id (the system Ucs.)…”